Time for a rant

Mr Stuart recently brought to my attention a rather splendid thing called Cows with Guns

Now this is a very amusing little ditty, but one thing about it stuck in my mind and tipped my normally serene thoughts over the edge into a full blown rant. The main protagonist of the story, a cow referred to as 'he' in the song, has udders!

Another, related point - and I appreciate that this song is meant to be a joke - but all the cows are your bog-standard black and white (for which read Friesian) dairy cows. As a general rule of thumb, these animals don't end up as burgers. They're bred to produce milk (overproduce milk, it would be fair to say), at the expense of meat. They are skinny things and by the time they have reached the end of their useful (to an intensive dairy farmer) life, they aren't fit for much more than dogfood.

Now I know that the bog-standard black and white cow is a useful shorthand for all bovines. It's easy to recognise even in cartoon form, and we know more or less what it is and what it means. But I would argue that this very shorthand lies at the root of the problem with our food culture today. Which is to say we have grown so accustomed to food being plentiful and cheap that we treat it like any old disposable commodity.

This pisses me off mightily.

Food is the stuff of life. There is nothing more important to us than the food that we eat and the water that we drink. Without them, nothing else matters. And yet in the western world we spend progressively less as a proportion of our take-home pay on food every year. Supermarkets remorselessly drive down the price of everything we eat- and we're quite happy to let them do it. We don't really care where our burgers come from as long as they're cheap. We love bog-offs (buy one get one free) and all the other promotions, but we never stop to think about how that food has been produced.

In the UK, at least, it's even worse in our schools, as Jamie Oliver showed in his recent television series. If children can't identify an onion or a potato, then what does that say about the values we are teaching them? And is it any surprise that in some inner city areas we have feral children out of control; that we have to drug an ever-increasing number of hyperactive kids; that asthma, obesity and diabetes are on the up? You are what you eat, and what we are is crap.

So where did it all go wrong? Who can we blame? It's easy to point to government (blaming Margaret Thatcher is always good sport, but she's been out of the political scene for well over a decade now). It's easy to point at the supermarkets, driving down costs and quality in the name of billion pound profits, but anyone who tried to buy an avocado in the seventies will have to admit that Tesco, Sainsbury, Asda et al have massively increased the variety of food available to us. It's easy to blame farmers, taking huge subsidy cheques from the EU whilst feeding mushed up cattle bits to other cattle, but the reality of farming in Britain today is really rather different to the tabloid-painted picture. It's easy to blame everyone.

But none of them forced us to eat the shit we put in our mouths every day.

The truth of the matter is that the vast majority of people really don't care. Food is so plentiful, cheap and easily available that we only get upset when someone gets ill. Then we wail and gnash our teeth; wring our hands and demand that 'something be done'; insist that 'they' are to blame and 'they' must be made to pay. Who the hell are 'they'?

We have lost our connection with the land, with the producers of food, to the extent that our children don't know where milk comes from. We munch our way through processed meals, burgers and other unidentifiable meat sources without a thought for the animals that have died to give us their flesh. We throw away almost a third of all the food we produce - that's how much we care about it.

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, in his wonderful The River Cottage Meat Book, argues that we should respect the animals that die for us by making the best possible use of their carcasses. Famously, you can eat everything in a pig except the squeal. It's not just animals, we should respect anything that we eat; we should care obsessively about our food. But we don't want to know - we just want our burgers. We're happy to eat what we like, what tastes superficially good and what's cheap.

We'll feed it to our children if it will give us a moment's peace (never mind that it makes them stupid, ill and violent in the long run), and so the cycle begins. Perhaps the most telling scene from Jamie's School Dinners was the angry parents passing fish and chips through the school gates to their children; demanding they stop feeding them vegetables and bring back the pizzas, turkey twizzlers and fizzy pop. It takes just one glass of cheap fruit squash or an artificially coloured sweet to turn my six year old nephew into a hyperactive, unreasonable bundle of rage. I hate to think what he'd be like if he was allowed to eat what he wanted all the time.

The answer is education, of course. It's the answer to everything. But how do you teach a person to care?

All this from a bullock with udders. And a cartoon bullock at that.